HIV Research for Prevention

RTI International researchers will be presenting strategies to foster open and iterative dialog between end-users and product developers of long-acting HIV-prevention products during the HIV Research for Prevention (HIVR4P) conference.

The presentations are part of an RTI-sponsored satellite session: Voices in the long-acting PrEP Movement, during the meeting, being held October 22 in Madrid.

During the session, presenters who work in product development and engage with young women and other priority populations in southern Africa will discuss ways to communicate between product developers and end-users for long-acting HIV PrEP products.

The research follows several recent HIV prevention trials had minimal ability to detect product effectiveness because participants were unwilling or unable to use investigational products.

At this satellite session, we will discuss:

• How research with end-users is informative during various stages of product development
• End-user perspectives: who are the end-users and what is the context of their lives
• Product-developer perspectives: who are the developers and what are their needs at different stages
• Linking developers with end-user research
• Marketing perspectives: using market segmentation and journey mapping to drive desire for prevention products
• How to optimize this dialogue

HIVR4P is a four-day scientific conference focused exclusively on the challenging and fast-growing field of biomedical HIV prevention research. HIVR4P supports cross-fertilization among research on HIV vaccines, microbicides, PrEP, treatment as prevention, and other biomedical prevention approaches.